“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
“A land unnamed is a land unguarded. A people unmeasured are a people imperiled.” — Grand Surveyor Konstantin Arkhotsev, 629 ZR
“Veliky Serebrinsk does not sleep; it waits. Its lights glitter on the river like promises, and beneath them the water remembers every stone that was forced into place.”
“They think I drink because I am empty. They never consider I drink because I feel everything.” - Anya
“The Winter Palace does not rule the empire. It reminds the empire that it is ruled.” — anonymous court chronicler, 612 ZR
“Mercy is a luxury of stability. I exist to ensure stability.” — Inquisitor-General Morozov, sealed testimony, 671 ZR
“The patient speaks clearly, performs his duties, and obeys without hesitation... yet when asked what brings him joy, he is silent.” — Physician Drovnin, On the Pallor of Modern Service, 579 ZR
High Zoryan — the ceremonial language of empire, law, and record, where power is spoken softly and made permanent.
“They do not ask me to paint what is there. They ask me to paint what must remain.” — Prince N. S. Lanskoy, private correspondence, 679 ZR
“The river erased our maps. The Crown erased us.” — graffiti recorded and removed, Low Banks district, 683 ZR
“The empire does not ask whether it should endure. It only asks how much it must measure to do so.”
“To be High Zoryan is not to ask who you are, but to know where you stand.”
“The empire does not endure because it is loved. It endures because it is necessary. History has never forgiven what collapses.”
“If you listen long enough, people will tell you what frightens them. If you remember it, they will never forgive you.”
“There are sins that demand repentance, and sins that demand silence. I am trusted with both, and absolved by neither.” — Archimandrite Innokenty Beloyar, private confession notes
“They tell me the Crown is heavier than it looks. What they do not tell me is how many hands have already been crushed beneath it.”
“I do not heal. I stay. And sometimes, staying is enough.” — attributed to Lev Arkadyevich Volkov
“They asked me to lie so the empire could endure. I refused—and learned that endurance is the lie.”
“Power wants to be remembered as inevitable. I prefer to remember it as tired.”
“The state does not fail when it starves its people. It fails when it teaches them that starvation is natural.”
“Mercy is not the absence of punishment. It is the certainty that punishment will be remembered.” — Pyotr Vasilievich Karsin, inaugural address to the Crown Inquisition
“You speak of suffering as though it were a failure. I assure you, it has been calculated.”
“I have learned that one can do great harm by doing nothing at all and still be praised for it.”
“What cannot be measured cannot be governed. What cannot be governed will eventually govern us.” — Konstantin Arkhotsev, marginal note on a revised provincial survey
“The empire does not conquer what it cannot describe. Therefore, description must come first.”

